Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

The bulk of mine came from a dream. I woke up and thought man that was good I want to know more about that. I wrote down some of the key aspects on sticky note on my desktop. I was in the middle of writing my second full novel so I couldn't do anything with it. I heard about nano on another site and decided to give it a shot. I didn't think it would be fair to start with a novel I was already 80K words into so I put it aside and wrote "The curse of the Thorns." A story about children who basically have to learn to survive on their own around 500 years after the bulk of human kind is wiped out, and the world is a mostly barren wasteland. It was a good story until I hit 48K and then it just ended. I had to struggle for the last 2K words to put it over the top and I haven't gone back and read how it turned out. So where did your idea come frome? Real life, a bizzare toilet accident, something someone said to you?

That's... an excellent question.

I can't remember there ever being an 'Aha!' moment for an idea, but the novel is more a soup of little fragments of ideas I've had in the past. There was an idea for a story in Wales and one for three men, and one for shadow people, and one for magic. Somehow this became three men going to Wales and finding a series of odd supernatural events occuring, with a constant malevolent presence in the darkness.

So there was no moment when the idea came to me, it just happened by me improvising and all these little fragments coming together. :D

(And can I just say, your story sounds EPIC).

A friend started up a new D&D campaign, and I created my main character for it.

My NaNovel sort of follows the initial leg of the campaign, but obviously since this is my version of it, I left out the stuff I didn't like (or couldn't remember) and added in new stuff.

The concept of right and wrong; actually. Like how one man can be all good and faithful and still hear about him 'going to hell' when he dies part. (Or even if there is a place to go to when that time comes.) It's like how evil can show you the right path because let's face it; we cannot define the righteous without the wrong. Well; enough said, I've been trying to stop myself from busting into flames since I started writing and attending mass.

Mine is actually an overgrown backstory.

I originally had an idea for a fairly generic romance with all the usual fluff, wangst and so on. But then I thought "What would have happened to make the character that way?" (he's a pretty grouchy git), and started coming up with all these evnts throughout his life. Originally I was just going to write it in as info in the main fic, but I got so into it that I realised I just HAD to write out the whole thing.

I think it's actually turning out a whole lot more interesting than the original story I came up with - though I'm still intending to write that. As a kind of 'relaxation' exercise - traditional romance is really easy to write. Tragic childhoods with realistic character development less so!

I built it a piece at a time, starting with my main character. She was what began as important, who she was, what made her what she was, the culmination of her experiences. My story is all about what she is becoming... the rest is just building blocks.

The shower. No really. I came up with my idea while I was taking a shower. It has nothing to do about being in a shower, but that is where I got my idea. That is the second best place for me to get my ideas. The first being dreams.

I don't really know what I was thinking about before I came up with this idea, but it blossomed there.

I had written a play about the Columbine massacre in my senior year, and I had a lot of left over ideas from that.. that I couldn't write because it wouldn't be factual.

I let those ideas stew for a while, and then I started to think about the characters.. Who kind of just showed up on my doorstep fully developed..

...Dalton, the fan fic. The idea started out in April as a reinvention of Dalton with a ton of original characters but a very similar plot line (it was also mirroring my best friend's first relationship with a guy). Somewhere during planning in October mythical creatures got thrown in and the thing left Dalton in the dust.

A scene popped into my head with my FMC in it, so I wrote it down, and then I didn't want to stop and do something else and lose NaNo steam. so I kept going and wrote a novel.

Dreams. That's where most of my ideas come from, though.

I really like to sleep as a result.

Um. Luck? I had this original idea planned out about a month before NaNo actualls tarted (can't remember where it came from), but once the 1st rolled around, I just couldn't write about it. So, my actual NaNo novel ended up blooming from the first random sentence that popped into my head during a word war.

Now I have prologues and more books planned.

I'm not quite sure aware of it.. I found NaNoWrimo the 7th of November this year and I decided to give it a try even though the first week was gone already and I didn't have anything planned out. Then I thought to myself: What do I like to read about myself?
- Dragons
How do I make it original:
- Dragons aren't a rare species nor is it supposed to be about dragonriders with only one dragon.. So I chose, well, in my novel, dragons are breeded and trained by breeders and then sold to the king and his army.
What should my main character be like?
- Female, because we see far too many male heroes around here. And really, she is a hero.

It took me three days to come up with a decent plot for my novel. I found that by talking to a friend about what interesting things could happen. I wasn't even given ideas, I found them myself by talking straight from my heart without thinking and then deciding 'Hey, this is good!'. I spent a lot of time thinking it all through while working, being in school, showering. Basically all my sparetime was used for thinking about what could be interesting in my novel.

Day 10 I started writing and I fell in love with my stubborn and reckless main character Emi, who was so outgoing and simply amazing. As the days went along I threw away and found new ideas and in the end, I couldn't help but feel like this is the perfect novel for fantasylovers like myself. ^^' And I finished writing the 50.000 words in 20 days.. And I'm nowhere near done. I've even started finding ideas for book 2 and 3 in the series too!!!!

I really have to thank NaNoWriMo for being so amazing and inspiring me tremendously so I got myself together and started writing this wonderful, wonderful story, which I love more than anything else by now.
Thank you NaNoWriMo. You are my hero.

I got mine from a dream.

Well I actually drew from my life for the characters and some of the things that my MC goes through. I've never experienced to two big plot points of my novel, but I've gone through a lot of the stuff that my MC deals with

My story idea came from an actual experience. I was riding a horse that hadn't been taken out for a trail ride, being that he was a retired racehorse. Something spooked him and he started rearing up with me still on and wasn't listening to me at all. A few weeks later, I began thinking about how it would play out into a story and what would happen to someone if they had fallen off and was seriously injured. And, thus, my story was born.

My story idea was formed from different ideas I have had for my other stories but have left out in the end. I decided to use those :)

Mine came from a wish. It was a slow day at work, and I started daydreaming about how much I wished certain stories were true. (I'll admit it - I was primarily thinking about Doctor Who :D). But I started to think about how in many ways, some stories were just too wonderful to NOT have happened, that it was almost tragic that such things, if they could be conceived, weren't a part of the real world.

That's when I got the idea that muses inspired writers with all the marvelous stories of the universe too far away for people to know otherwise. That muses' real job was to take stories to wonderful or important to NOT tell and tell them. So, if this completely-unrelated-to-Doctor-Who story ever becomes a classic of its own, it owes its existence to the fact that Doctor Who is so completely wonderful lol.

Mine came from a video game idea which was almost nothing like how my story turned out.

I actually don't know where my idea came from. That should be more worrying to me than it is.